"The
Battle of Maldon" was written late in the Anglo-Saxon period,but we are beginning with it because it
epitomizes what was, perhaps, most typical about Anglo-Saxon and early Germanic
culture--the focus on loyalty to one's lord (hlaford or eorl) to the
point of sacrificing one's family, one's children, and even one's life.

The
early Germanic culture was basically a tribal culture, not unlike that of the
North American Plains Indians in the 19th century.People lived in groups of kindredcalled by the Irish septs and by the Germanic tribes sippe (see Herlihy, Medieval Households for more detail)
with several sippe serving a chief or
lord who was elected by the tribe to be their leader in staving off the double
dangers of external and internal destruction.The sippe were not nuclear
families, by any means, but combinations of up to 50 related households
farming, hunting, owning, and ranging over a particular geographical
territory.Each household consisted of a
chief and his wife (or wives) and concubines, their young children, and various
older children of other kindred.The
Germanic sippes tended to foster
their children out, sending them after what we now call the "preschool
years" into the homes of relatives--usually aunts or uncles--to be
raised.This practice of fostering
persisted well into the 16th and 17th centuries, until
the church's push towards the "affective" marriage and family
relationships, along with demographic and political factors, finally shaped the
slow development of the nuclear (but often extended) family in the 18th
century. (For more information, see Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage,
1500-1800).

Richer
households tended to garner more of the women, who were valued for their skills
as administrators, manufacturers of household goods (including beer--women were
the brewers of that all important staple food), agricultural labors, and sexual
attractiveness.Sexual behavior was
quite loose among early medieval peoples, and because a man could never know
for sure if his wife's or concubine's children were his or

another's, the strongest
adult-child ties tended not to be parent-child, but uncle-nephew, nephew-aunt,
aunt-niece, etc. A person could always count on his or her sister's children to
be blood relatives; hence the most important relationships were usually
sibling, aunt/uncle/niece/nephew, and cousin relationships. (See Herlihy, pp.
52-55).

If
you are interested in seeing what an Anglo-Saxon house might have looked like,
take a trip to the Olentangy Indian Caverns in Delaware,
Ohio and visit the Iroquois Long House in
their "FrontierTown" there.Or
go to the Web page for The Wharram Percy
archaeology project (Web address:
http://loki.stockton.edu/~ken/wharram/wharram.htm). This project has
been uncovering and studying British peasant homes, and
there are some good pictures on their Web site.Homes of wealthier chiefs would undoubtedly have been bigger but
probably not much more complex

The
political system of the Anglo-Saxons, as of most Germanic tribes, centered
around a hlaford or eorl who was elected by the chiefs of
the sippes united in a particular
area.This lord would gather around him
a comitatus of warriors.Their job was to keep the tribe safe from
attacks from other tribes, natural disasters, and feuds within the tribe.In exchange for their dedicated loyalty to
fighting for the lord, the hlaford
dispensed gold, rings, horses, and other movable goods (including the surviving
men, women, and children of the defeated tribe who would become slaves)
according to the tribe's success in raiding other tribes. Hence in the
literature, the lord is frequently called the "treasure-giver."

The
comitatus would live in the
"mead hall" with their lord; when they were not preparing for or
recovering from battle, they would spend their evenings eating, drinking huge
quantities of beer, recounting old glories, listening to the scop or minstrel sing heroic, epic songs
about the feats of others, and boasting about what they would do in the future
to demonstrate their loyalty to their lord.We think of boasting today as silly and egotistical, but it served an
important function in Anglo-Saxon society Boasting was not mere bragging, but
more like the declaration of a promise--a statement of one's intention to serve
the lord and the tribe even in the most extreme circumstances, putting the good
of the whole community before one's personal desires and needs.

Words have
the power to shape reality, and standing up in front of the comitatus and
bragging about how in battle he would slaughter twenty men, steal 50 horses,
grab 20 gold arm bands, and defend his companions and his lord to the death was
a sure way of making certain that a young man might actually do the hard and
frightening work of the warrior. Not living up to one's boasts (and surviving
battle through cowardice rather than through prowess) earned derision and loss
of status; in severe cases of cowardice or betrayal, it could earn a warrior
the ostracism of the tribe or even exile--the worst of all Anglo-Saxon
punishments.

Unfortunately,
words, especially drunken words, can also lead to anger, and a frequent problem
in Anglo-Saxon life was the breaking out of feuds between members of a sippe or comitatus.Sometimes a
result of a "bar room brawl, " sometimes as a result of a sexual
betrayal, sometimes as a result of quarrels over property, or perhaps as a
result of an attempt to take political control of the sippe, or over an old grudge going back as much as two or three
generations, Anglo-Saxon people would kill members of their own sippe or kingdom.Revenge was powerfully built into
Anglo-Saxon cultural expectations:if
someone killed one of your family members, you were obligated to return the
favor by killing them or one of their family members.Feuds would therefore escalate and could
result in the complete destruction of a sippe
or comitatus.Anglo-Saxon law attempted to curb the
destructive power of revenge by assigning a wergild
or payment to be exacted in case of damages for every person in the
society.According to the law, if you
killed someone, you were supposed to pay their family the worth of the dead
person's wergild, and that payment
was meant to stop actions of revenge.It's unclear how successful the law was in staving off tribal
destruction from within, but certainly much of the literature focuses on
feuding, betrayal, and destruction of sippes
due to internal violence.